My Friend Said a Lot of Dietary Supplements Go Right Through the Body Without Being Absorbed and End up in the Sewers...is There Any Truth in This?

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Said a lot of dietary supplements go right through the body without being absorbed and end up in the sewers. Is there any truth in this? This is JJ Virgin, four time New.

York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition.

Expert and fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you.

Welcome to Ask the Health Expert.

Jaquila from Facebook asks. My friend said a lot of dietary supplements go right through the body without being absorbed and end up in the sewers. Is there any truth in this? Hey, it's JJ and I've got my buddy Sean Wells with us today to answer this question. He is the world's leading nutritional biochemist and expert on health optimization. He's formulated over 500 supplements, foods, beverages and cosmeceuticals and patented 10 novel ingredients and now is known as the ingredientologist. That means the scientist of ingredients. Formerly he was a chief clinical dietitian with over a decade of clinical experience and he's counseled thousands of people on innovative health solutions such as keto, paleo, fasting and supplements. He's also personally overcome various health issues including Epstein Barr virus, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, depression, insomnia, obesity and a pituitary tumor. As a world renowned thought leader and author on mitochondrial health, his expertise can help any health conscious individual to better manage stress, experience higher performance and gain energy through utilizing his practical research based solutions and his new book, it's called the Energy Formula. You want to grab that? He's also an action, sci, fi and fantasy nerd who loves Spartan races. All right, we'll be right back with the answer, so stay with me.

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So this is a great question. This is one I've gotten a bunch through the years. And it comes from a audio tape, I think back in the 80s called dead doctors and it sold tons and tons of liquid multivitamins on the idea that tablets go through your body and go into the toilet and end up in the sewer and they're never used by anyone. A tablet is somehow some unabsorbable form of multivitamins or ingredients from supplements. And this quite simply isn't true. Tablets dissolve quite readily. It's just a format that's more stable, that's less hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs less water. Some people like tablets, some people don't. It just depends on you and your feelings. If you want to prove this out to yourself. You can take your tablet and put it in a vinegar based solution that's approximately a 2 pH. That's very similar to the lumen of the gut, the, the stomach. And you can test this out and see how readily your tablet dissolves. But quite frankly, I mean, you think about all the drugs that are in tablet form and tablets have been studied for years and years and years and they have slow dissolving, fast dissolving, they have coated layers that releases in bilayers and you know different speeds at which they can break down. It's called pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, and all of this has been studied for decades. And so tablets do work. Does that mean it's the best form? Potentially not. I mean, you know, a capsule can work just as well and is more easily swallowed, and that's important for some people. Does a liquid work better? No, not necessarily. Now, there can be elements of these things that may bypass the harsh digestive tract and may be more stable. Things like proteins, certain proteins, very small proteins like enzymes and things like that sometimes need to be coated and protected to make it past the stomach. And in those cases, it's actually going to be either microencapsulated spheres or material or tablets that are going to actually be superior. But sometimes there's ways of bypassing digestion and the liver detoxification in general by doing things like intranasal, doing things like transdermal. All of these are interesting delivery system methods that, again, get used in drug system deliveries. So that would be the answer is there's a variety of ways that you can deliver supplements. I think the capsule and tablet are tried and true. They're very stable, they're very portable, they're very easy to use. I'm okay with using liquids, but, you know, with liquids you also get often sugars and different things that are added to those. So to me, probably my preferred form is going to be a capsule because you have the least amount of things added to it. With a tablet, you do have to sometimes add binders and colors and things like that. It just depends. But in general, tablets work. This is a complete myth.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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